


Until It Is, Itself, the Sea

by redteeth



Category: The Lighthouse (2019)
Genre: Anti-Hero, Birth Horror, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Egg Laying, F/M, Fantasy Body Dysphoria, Fantasy Intersex, Gore, Horror, M/M, Miscarriage, Morally Ambiguous Character, Mpreg, Non-Human Genitalia, References to Bestiality, References to Incest, Spoilers, Tentacles, pregnancy horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 14:07:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22982506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redteeth/pseuds/redteeth
Summary: Thomas Howard impersonates Ephraim Winslow long enough to get onto the ship, and then he drowns at sea. He wonders when he will start actually dying.Or, a mer-shark Thomas(Ephraim) X mer-ctopus Wake story. High key body horror. Main pairing is Thomas/Thomas but the f/m mermaid stuff is significant. Gross fic, do not read.
Relationships: Thomas Howard/Mermaids, Thomas Wake/Ephraim Winslow, Thomas Wake/Thomas Howard
Comments: 24
Kudos: 193





	Until It Is, Itself, the Sea

He hated the sea long before it killed him.

When he first sets foot on the ship, guilt snaking up his gut to his throat, he tries to tell himself that the nausea is due more to the strangled feeling in his chest than the sway of the deck below his boots. That he can’t get comfortable, can’t sleep, because of the fear that he’ll meet someone, one man, who knew Ephraim, before Thomas became Ephraim, and not because of the dampness that permeates everything on board the damn boat, the wet cold bite to the air, the smell of the men, the scream of the birds...

He tells himself he’ll get used to it, as the land narrows to a sliver behind them, as he gets further away from anyone who could find out what he’d done.

But he doesn’t get used to it, and that makes it all the more hateful when it swallows them, and everything that comes after that.

* * *

He hates the gulls, especially. They follow the ship out to sea, riding the wind out behind them, and they’re bold; on the second day one snatches a rind of bread from his hand. The older men laugh at him, and he hates them too. One of them tells him it’s good luck, some nonsense about sea birds and good weather, and the souls of sailors lost at sea, but he’s already stamping below deck to find some other chore, face red and hot.

* * *

He hates the sea at night, the most. It makes him feel so _ small_.

* * *

When the weather turns, he mistakes the men’s shift in demeanor as tenacity. They get quiet, not only because the roar of the wind becomes too loud for anything other than shouted orders, and they throw themselves vigorously into their tasks, and Thomas (Ephraim, he reminds himself), feels as close as he ever will to respecting them, these hearty men.

He realizes the truth later. He realizes when he turns his head up from winding rope, noticing the strange way the deck shifts, and looks out over the sea, to see they’ve gone nearly sideways on the back of a great swell. The storm turns dark, and the rain comes down into the wind, stinging sharp across his cheeks.

He freezes, as the men around him increase their pace, but never grow frantic, never panic. He hadn’t known about sailors and the sea.

In the wind, he thinks he hears singing.

Then the water comes up over the deck, a foot, four feet, and then the whole deck is below the sea. He scrambles, trying to remember where the lifeboats were, but they’re under too, and for a moment, he’s standing in the river again, Ephraim going under between the logs.

This time, he goes under too.

He grabs at the debris, at the men near him, trying to pull himself up, but the sea has a hold on all of them, and nothing can be done. When it comes up over his body it soaks through his clothes in a moment, and it’s already in his nose and mouth when he tries to hold his breath. He panics, and begins to drown, as they are all pulled down into the silent space below the waves.

He drowns first, because he wasn’t a sailor, and he never should have been on the boat.

Fuck Ephraim, he thinks, as his lungs burn with salt water, and he blacks out.

And fuck the fucking sea.

* * *

One of the other sailors had told him that drowning in the icy water was like going to sleep. Your body goes into shock, and you’re dead in three minutes.

That is not his experience. Drowning fucking hurts, and it lasts a lot longer than it’s supposed to.

He figures that out when he opens his eyes, and can’t see anything, but he’s still drowning, body still on fire and aching, from his eyes and nose down through his ribs. His legs have gone numb from the cold. He feels more than he sees the shapes of the dead men around him in the dark, and the hulking wreck of their ship below and around them. He can’t tell which way is up, and he can’t move his body to do anything about it even if he could. The water is still as a tomb around them.

He remembers, the night before they’d left land, sitting with the sailors and trying to play friendly as they drank and told stories. He remembers how they spoke about the sea. Like it had a will, like there were gods in its depths.

He wonders which thing he’s being punished for.

* * *

He does not remember dying, but he thinks he must have, because the drowning never stops, and he realizes he must be in hell.

The water is black around him, and he can’t feel the presence of the bodies or the ship. A cold, empty expanse, a weight pressing in on him from all sides, the water in his belly weighing him down. He brings a hand to his face, he thinks, and he can’t see his fingers; they feel foreign when they touch his cheek, his lips. He tries to kick, but he feels too heavy. He feels like he’s been tied down. 

He panics again, and the rage comes out of him this time, the rage that bubbled up whenever another man put him down. Winslow, his teachers before that, his father before that. The rage that other men told him was a weakness, his inability to control himself. Screaming and not making a sound, the meat of his throat unable to turn the water into voice. Thrashing in the dark miles below the light.

When he becomes exhausted, he tries to count the seconds in his head. He tries to recall the longest a man has lived without air. He’s not booksmart, but he’s not stupid. The number he counts to doesn’t make sense.

* * *

Soon, the drowning feeling turns to something else. 

He must be half mad by this point. He doesn’t know how long its been. He’s started re-counting the minutes several times over. He’s reached an hour several times over.

His whole body is aching, as much as he can feel it, and so the slow swell of the ache of his teeth catches him by surprise. 

His teeth, his jaw, the flesh of his mouth catch fire, and he presses his strange cold fingers to them, down onto his tongue and into his gums, and he thinks he can smell the coppery scent of blood, though he knows it’s impossible. But then he bites into his own finger, too easily, by accident, and lashes his hand away, hysterical. 

* * *

He loses his mind, for awhile.

Things find their way into his mouth. Wriggling, cold, tasting of the sea. He gags, but they push their way down his throat anyway, whole or in pieces, and he identifies the new pain in his belly as hunger. 

He cannot think reasonably, but he remembers later, the cut of a fin inside his cheek. The slimy burn of some poisonous thing in his throat. He remembers his teeth tearing into something woven, and wonders if it was one of the crew.

He realizes the things aren’t crawling into his mouth, pushing their own way in.

He’s eating them.

He swallows and swallows, but the hunger never goes away.

He’s still blind, and he’s still drowning.

* * *

Eventually he notices the shark.

There’s a lull in the eating, and it feels almost like waking up, though he knows that he wasn’t asleep.

He must be closer to the surface, because can see the white shapes of his hands in the black. The skin of his arms is flaking, sloughing off like snakeskin, clouding the water. He doesn’t think, just bites at it, swallows it in slick gulps, and he’s turning in the water when he sees the sharp gray fin cutting through the black.

He panics and it feels like the drowning all over again, like he’s being smothered, and he rolls his body to escape but he’s still too heavy. He can make out the white shape of his body, his wool coat lost somewhere in the wreck, the tatters of his shirt whirling around his ribs as he flails and tries to kick away. His legs won’t respond, and it’s because the shark already has him, huge jaw already locking up around his belly, inching up in rolling toothless grasps, like he’d once watched a snake swallow a mouse.

He kicks, hoping his boot might rupture the shark from within, might puncture its heart or its lung or whatever sharks have, but the shark just kicks its tail and sends them both tumbling.

He digs his fingers into it, looking for the black eye, but all he can reach is his own body, his fingers pinching into his own skin. 

He wants to scream. He wants some thing, this animal, some animal, to hear him and carry some memory of his fury after he’s gone. He tries, straining his throat against the water.

* * *

Just like the drowning, it goes on for long enough that he notices something’s wrong.

He stares down his body at it, fingers pressing at the place where the teeth should be, finding only his own skin. He turns his body and clawing finger tips lower, far past where the eyes and gills should be, and it’s still his own skin.

He thinks of an animal, decomposing on top of another animal, the flesh of their bodies dissolving into each other, their bones falling together, until it’s just one thing, one terrible creature. He thinks of a drawing he’d seen of a strange fish with a light on its head, and the story of how the male dissolves into the female when it mates.

There was never a shark.

He pulls his hands away, and he looks away, and he cannot touch it anymore.

* * *

He does not adjust well.

He realizes that the reason he’d been able to eat so plentifully in his mad hunger was this thing propelling him. It’s powerful when he can get it to do what he wants, but he’s slow to learn, clumsy, and he’s never had the patience for a difficult task. He rages, foaming the water, the great tail sending him spinning dizzily and making him sick.

He keeps trying to scream. Why, he tries to say. Why me, why this? The black sea doesn’t answer.

He finds the suffocating sea around him hosts more life than he’d realized. Small things dart from him in the dark, bony, spiny, white eyed, translucent. The hunger isn’t nearly as powerful as it first was, but it’s still gnawing. He thinks about turning back and eating into the guts of this thing that’s taken his legs. He doesn’t, because he’s a coward. 

The first thing he catches when he’s lucid is gelatinous, guts bursting as he closes his hand around it. He doesn’t feel sick when he looks at the strings and strands of its body come out into the water, though he knows he should. He notices his fingers, the sharp black of his nails, strangely shaped. He puts the remains of the animal in his mouth and feels, for the first time, the sharp jagged teeth.

Thomas fucking hates the sea. And now it’s made him part of it.

* * *

When he’s tired of being angry, in between eating the creatures, he tries to escape.

His eyes have adjusted, whether it’s natural or part of the unnatural process of the change he’s undergone, and he can see distant shapes, the change of the light through the black, and he knows where the surface is. 

When he tries to reach it, however, the weight of the water presses in and suffocates him, and he always gives up before he reaches it, drifting exhausted back to the depths. 

He cannot go down, either, as he dives, the water chills even further and makes him sluggish, and he’s gripped by the fear that he’ll become too weak to swim back up.

So he keeps returning, to nowhere, to a watery void, full of life but no land, and no hope.

* * *

The first siren comes upon him when he’s in a fugue, the closest he can get to sleeping, when he lets the shark eat. He thinks he’s having a dream, of a girl he’d known when he was young, of the feel of her soft body against his when they’d both lost their virginity in her family’s hay loft. He comes aware and they’re already fucking.

She has her pale arm around his shoulder, the other braced at his throat, keeping his snapping jaws away from her throat with a chilling ease. She’s beautiful, lips full, dark hair billowing around them, her breasts full and swaying in the water as she fucks herself on his... 

He looks down, and she grips him harder to keep him in place. She looks him in the eye now, as if she can sense the animal receding and the man returning, wondering what he’ll do. She moves her lips and strange sounds come out, a language beyond man, and it reminds him of the singing he’d heard in the wind, before he’d been pulled out of the world forever.

He puts his hands on her body, on her breasts, and placated, she relaxes, and he can see the slick opening where they’re connected, and her long tail wound predatorily around his. It reminds him, again, of a snake. His head is swimming.

His orgasm takes him suddenly, and after so much pain, it’s an ecstasy beyond compare.

There’s a flash, and then he drifts loose and lazy in the water, and she’s gone. He looks down his belly at the strange sight of the shark’s genitalia, not one but two strangely shaped cocks, his spend still clouding the water. As he watches, they slip back into an opening he hadn’t realized was there, a narrow slit on the belly between two of the smaller fins.

He screams, and claws at his hip bones, trying and trying to find the seam where the shark’s body could be separated from his body, but no matter how far he cuts into the flesh, it’s still all one animal.

He’s so sure that he must be dead.

* * *

More come after that. They force him, streaking from the dark, pale skinned, dark skinned, always stronger than him, coiling around the shark’s body and undulating against the slit until it gives them what they want. He watches, once, as one rubs the folds of her vaginal opening against the shark’s slit, until he feels a surge inside him, and the first penis slithers into her, the second slipping into the space between them as she grinds down. Sometimes, there’s more than one, and they take turns, using one cock and then the other, until he’s shaking from it.

He doesn’t complain, and he never fights, because it’s the only fucking thing that makes him feel anything good in this place. He kisses their mouths, sucks their nipples, and they let him, though they never kiss back. They sometimes respond like human women in other ways, running their hands over his skin, murmuring things in their strange language, and he can forget, for a little while.

They always leave him when he’s come inside them. He tries to follow them, but they’re so much faster than him. He wants to yell, wants to beg them to let him stay with them. He wants to scream at them, to hurt them, to rape them, to prove he’s not the weaker creature, that he’s not so fucking desperate. So desperate to not be alone anymore.

He knew his soul was ugly before the drowning. He screams words they can’t hear and then curls in on himself in shame.

The pain of drowning is dull, and his belly is almost always full. He can’t look at the tail, or the strange opening where the cocks emerge. He still can’t make a sound.

* * *

There’s awhile where they don’t come, and he picks a direction, not up or down, and swims until he’s exhausted. He thinks he must have travelled miles, but he comes upon nothing, no land, no island. The sea is vast and terrible, no more than for those lost in it.

* * *

He hears their songs in the distance when they come again, and he flees from them, spiteful. When they catch him, they’re furious.

There are more of them, many more than he’s seen at once, and they school around him, blotting the light. They’re beautiful, and terrifying, and if he had breath to catch in his throat, it would. They catch him and begin to tangle around him, but he fights this time, sick and tired of it all, wondering if they’ll kill him, finally, finally, finally.

One of his favorites, the pale mermaid with dark hair who’d first found him, takes her turn first. He realizes this is different when he sees the smoldering look in her eyes, and the swell of her belly, and he stops fighting.

She mounts him, but there’s a roughness to it, her clawed fingers digging into his belly, eyes closed tight in concentration as she pistons her hips. The other mermaids wind around him, holding his arms, keeping him rigid, an object for her to use. He can’t stop looking at the round bulb of her belly.

Is it mine, he wants to ask. What is it, he wants to ask.

Her face contorts, and he feels the powerful convulsing of her orgasm. He comes. Then she sobs, he can think of no other way to describe it, and he feels something else.

The eggs are gelatinous, the size of a goose’s egg, but round and translucent. They emerge from her vagina as she pulls off his cock, encased in a slimy, sticky film that coats his cock and his belly. His semen floods out of her in the slime, mixed with the eggs, as she labors them out.

He tries to scream, to struggle. He snaps at them with his teeth, and one winds her arm under his jaw, bearing her own flat, white teeth in a sneer. All the while, the dark haired mermaid, flushed faced, empties her pussy in sticky clumps between them.

The eggs writhe. When he stares, he sees little things inside, creatures like the strange spiny things he’s been eating. One breaks the shell of its egg in a burst of thick fluid and specks of abandoned flesh, and it darts out between the tails of the sirens, lost instantly in the black. Others follow, wiggling free of their casings like tadpoles.

None of them look human. They don’t look like the sirens either. Or him, if he’s the father of these things. They look deformed, some with mouths too big, others with no mouths at all, some with limbs and some without. All are blind and eyeless.

The sirens are making a wailing, agonized sound, all together, like some kind of hellish choir. The mother of the creatures clutches her face and rolls back into the arms of the others. The women push him away and release him, and he claws at the viscous sac and remainders of the eggs clinging to his stomach and slit. Some of the eggs were born dead, and he crushes the little creatures as he scrapes them off.

The mermaids are swarming around the mother, ignoring him, and so it’s easy to fling his tail in the way he’s learned to catch prey, and sink his teeth into one of the siren’s throats.

The wailing becomes a screaming, and he’s battered by their tails as they bash against him, but the damage is done and there is blood in the water, in his mouth. Her blood is black in the water, and he can’t be sure if it’s only the lightless depths that make it appear so.

A blow catches him across the back of the head, and he sees spots before he

finally

finally

finally

loses consciousness.

* * *

When he wakes, it’s in fits and starts. His head is pounding and he feels like he’s been trampled by a horse.

It’s the first time he notices that he’s not drowning anymore.

The dark haired mermaid is holding him, keeping him from drifting into the frigid depths. She looks grim faced as he opens his eyes and fixes on hers. The others are nowhere nearby, that he can tell.

He thrashes and regrets it instantly, nearly blacking out from dizziness. She lets him go and hovers nearby, long tail flicking and gleaming in the dim light. Waiting. It’s the first time one of them has been close without trying to fuck him.

She mouths something, the strange words cutting through the water, inhuman and layered like a song. He thinks she might be asking a question, and he shakes his head, slowly. He mouths “what the fuck??” but doubts she understands.

She points in a direction, and starts to swim. He doesn’t follow, at first, and she stops in the distance, a dim shape.

Fuck them, he thinks. Too little too late.

But the depths of the sea are crushing, and so he runs his hand over his stomach again, and follows.

* * *

His head clears as they swim, slow at first and then with increasing speed, but she never goes so fast that he loses sight of her. He wonders if she’s luring him into a trap, into some kind of painful death, but they could have let him sink if they’d wanted that.

He wonders what they’d wanted from him. Maybe the sex was supposed to be fun for them and they weren’t supposed to fall pregnant, and the egg thing was a punishment. Or maybe they thought it would result in something different than what she’d had. A mermaid child, or even a human, maybe. He didn’t know why that was his fault. He didn’t even know why he was here.

After a length of time, he notices the water warming, and a shape in the distance. It’s colossal, and he thinks it’s land at first. Streams of light cut through the black depths below them, and he realizes that he’s looking at a massive undersea mountain. A dormant volcano.

He sinks further into the deep than he’s been comfortable with. The streams of molten rock are miles below, and must be boiling the water at their depth, but this far above they’re pleasantly warm, soothing on his battered body. He loses sight of the dark haired mermaid as he lazily approaches the black peaks of the underwater mountain, but spots the sheen of her scales again not long after.

She looks lovely in the dim light of the molten rock below. Her belly has flattened, but her pussy still looks swollen and loose from the birth, and he feels a spark of desire, despite everything. He comes close, and catches her in his arms, and she lets him for a moment, until he tries to penetrate her. Then she knocks him off, expression furious, and darts into the crags of the mountain. He grinds his teeth, and he chases.

He chases her through caves and caverns of weirdly shaped volcanic rock, porous and full of small places to hide. It’s so strange after so long in the open sea that he feels the prickle of his skin, like he’s breaking out in a sweat, but underwater it’s vestigial. He squirms through tight spaces and arches, a maze of holes, and she keeps just in sight, just ahead, so much that he suspects, again, that he’s being lead. But he’s still angry, still hungry, still horny, and this has to lead to something, so he doesn’t care.

When he loses sight of her, finally, he stops, turning the shark’s body in a tight circle in the small space. There’s a strange light, reflected up from the lava below, he thinks, and it illuminates the bizarre caverns and the multitude of holes leading to a multitude of tunnels. A maze. Little creatures crawl along the walls, hide in the tiny pores of the stone, and the floors and walls grow algae and long streaming ribbons of seaweed. A peculiar kind of paradise, teeming with life.

He eats some of the creatures, snatching them as they skitter along the walls and crunching through their shells, and even chews some of the plants as he lurks through the caverns, looking for the shine of the mermaid’s tail. 

He arrives at a large cavern, porous along the bottom, vents of warm water flowing up through them and tousling the long seaweed. The water is murky here, and makes him feel hazy and warm, and he’s thinking about lying on the rocks to rest for a moment when a sudden voice shakes him out of his thoughts and sends him back against the wall. A voice like thunder, trembling the water around and inside of his body.

A creature emerges from the rock formation in the center of the cavern. It looks, for a moment, like an old man, white haired and grizzled, but he’s too big, twice the size of a man or more, and his eyes shine with an eerie light. His saggy, wrinkled body is caked with barnacles and decorated with shells, and he wears a crown of shell and rock, glittering in the dim light as if small things are crawling through it. Thomas can’t make out the rest of him, the man creature lifting himself from the cradle of stone with his strangely long arms.

Thomas trembles, and tries to wriggle along the wall to escape before he’s noticed, when the monster speaks again, turning its entrancing eyes on him. 

“Lad...”

Thomas’ body chills, and he freezes. English, he thinks, staring at the thing. The man speaks english?

The old man’s mouth parts in a snaggle toothed grin, settling on his elbows from his perch, and he says in a sailor’s drawl, “So the girls caught another one, did they? You got a name, lad?”

Thomas stares round eyed. This was a man once? Or was it only fooling him? He would never have said he believed in the stories sailors told of the sea, but if he’s not in hell then he does believe them now, and he can’t know what manner of monster or god this is. The accent is familiar, comforting even after only hearing the sirens’ language for so long, but it resonates in a way a human voice doesn’t.

“Cat got yur tongue, eh?” the old man continues. “That means you ha’en’t let the sea water all through ye, if you don’t got yur sea voice yet.”

Thomas pushes cautiously away from the wall. If the old man knows more about what’s happened to him... He gestures to his throat, opening his mouth.

The old man nods knowingly, tapping his bearded chin with one long finger. “I remember when it happened t’ me, oh, years ago now... I was a lighthouse wickie, y’see, and storm came up over the rocks and swept all o’ us down into the depths. Sailor all my life, so I knew she’d make a grave for me eventually, but I didn’t expect... well, you know...”

Thomas lets the warm swirl of air drift him up to the level of the man, keeping his distance. The strange eyes sweep over the shark’s tail curiously. “Tha’s a new one, ain’t seen the sea change a man into a shark before... See, they usually look more like the girls, or... in my case...”

Thomas jerks back when he sees the coil of a huge dark tentacle lift from the hazy water beneath the seaweed. Now that’s he’s looking, he can see them, webbed out along the cavern floor, like a giant octopus, stretching below and behind him. 

“Don’t be fearful, lad,” the old man says, as he pushes himself from the cradle of stone and pulls all of his black arms with him, twining them together and fanning them out about the room. He’s a giant, each tentacled arm as thick as his waist at the base of it. If the man had wanted to grab him, Thomas realizes with a chill, he could have done so a dozen times already.

“I’m not complainin’,” he continues. “Grateful the sea kept me at all. But _ you_, lad,” the eyes rake over him again, with some expression Thomas can’t identify. “The sea must like _ you_.”

Thomas shakes his head, because he knows that can’t be true. He wills the shark’s tail to ease him back towards the tunnel he’d come through, trying to be inconspicuous. He doesn’t know if this thing is a man eater, but he’d rather not take his chances, whether he could tell him more about his change or not.

“Name’s Thomas,” the old man says, and for a moment Thomas blanches, believing the thing a mind reader, until he says, “Thomas Wake.”

Flummoxed at the coincidence, his mouth opens to answer, before he catches himself (Ephraim, I’m supposed to be-) and then he realizes that Thomas Howard and Ephraim Winslow are both dead and there’s no need for any of it at all anymore.

He slaps his chest, and points to Wake, and back to himself. He mouths his name.

Wake stares with those white eyes, and then cracks a huge smile, and a laugh that rumbles the rock of the cavern. “Ain’t that a coincidence! Another Thomas? Well, lad, confusing for there t’ be two of us, so I’ll call ya Tommy, how’s that?”

Thomas doesn’t like it, but he sticks on a smile and nods anyway. He pats his throat again.

Wake nods and settles himself back amongst the seaweed again, putting Thomas at ease as he winds his tentacles among the rocks. “Like I said, ye let the sea in, yur voice’ll come. When the sea takes sailors, sometimes she picks ‘un she likes. Ain’t no great purpose to it, no punishment or blessing. Just wants to keep ye.”

Why, Thomas thinks, and gestures with his arms. 

“Why? Why’s the sea do anything?” Wake answers, looking thoroughly mystified. 

Thomas frowns. This man is as difficult to speak to as the men aboard the boat, so he truly believes he was a sailor at some point. He points outward, and gestures again, flapping his arm like a fish’s tail, hands shaping an hourglass.

“The girls?” Wake asks. “The sea’s daughters. Just spoiled brats, really. They’ll toy around with ya if you let ‘em, but they’re not interested in much more than that.”

Thomas wants to ask why they’ve been fucking him crazy, then, but he doesn’t want to act that one out. He just shakes his head, and Wake eyes him curiously.

“The last time the girls lured in a lad like you was... I can’t even recall! Only complaint I have down here is the solitude... I miss drinkin’ and dancin’ and good company! Stay awhile, Tommy my lad!” Wake throws his skinny arms wide over the cavern, the span of his arms wider than Thomas’ whole body. “This is the nicest place you’ll find in this wide sea! Stay awhile, and I’ll tell ya everythin’ I know about the change...”

Thomas is in the mouth of the tunnel, having drifted slowly into it, and he thinks about staying, then, he really does. But Wake must not notice his hesitation, or maybe he’s impatient, because between one blink and the next one of Wake’s tentacles whips like lightning through the hazy water and coils tight around the shark’s tail.

Thomas panics, instinct kicking in, and he wrenches his body away, he and the shark in agreement that it’s time to get the fuck out. The tentacle loosens but doesn’t let go, and Wake’s expression grows thunderous, the light changing around him as he hauls himself up and spreads his eight animal arms, looking so fearsome and frightening that Thomas is sure he must be a god, then. Wake’s voice comes out in a wave, that ancient tongue, and Thomas senses it’s ordering him to do something, but he’s angry, so angry, and he’ll not take orders from fucking anybody now. So he turns his whole body and sinks his teeth into the tentacle, severing it, and the same motion takes him darting up the tunnel as the other arms shoot up behind him, reaching, clinging, missing him.

“Please, lad!” he hears the timber of Wake’s voice change, echoing through the chambers as he searches frantically for the way out. “They have me trapped here, lad, I’m going mad! I don’t want to be alone, I’m so afraid to be alone...”

The voice fades as Thomas finds a stream of colder water, and whips up through it as fast as he’s ever gone in this body, and then he’s free of the mountain.

* * *

He swims, again, until he’s exhausted. He swims until he can’t see the shadow of the mountain anymore. He expects, every moment, for the sirens to come after him, but they don’t appear. 

He slows when he’s tired, and he screams again, until his throat and chest ache from the force of trying to make a sound, ANY sound. 

He HATES the sea.

* * *

After some time in open water again, he finds himself over a sea shelf. Coral grows here, and colorful fish are plentiful. He eats them all, even the ones he knows must be poisonous, but he never grows ill, and his injuries heal swiftly. The water is warmer, and he can almost feel the rays of the sun when he rests along the sandy floor.

Compared to the early days, when his body hurt all the time, it’s luxurious.

He’s miserable.

He hates the sirens, because he hates that they used him, but he loved fucking them. He thinks of the dark haired mermaid, of her supple body and the way her mouth felt when he kissed it.

He can’t bring himself to touch the shark’s... HIS... cocks. He can’t touch the body at all. HIS body.

It was easier, thinking of it as a parasite, that maybe his own legs and his own asshole and his own cock and balls were still in there, enveloped by the fish body, but the pleasure the sex gave him made it harder and harder to separate. And, though he hates just about everything... sometimes he looks down the smooth sinewy expanse of his new body and catches himself... admiring.

A shark, he thinks. If he had to pick something, he would have picked a shark. An apex predator. A master of the sea.

He had tried hard, in his life, to be good. But he was never good enough for the people around him. And so, he thought, if he can never be good enough, why bother? 

Why not be bad?

He thinks about the dark haired mermaid. He thinks about eating her, of biting into her throat as he fucks her, and he feels one of the cocks on the shark’s belly begin to slip free.

He bites his lip, gently, mindful of his teeth. God, he wants to masturbate. He doesn’t know if he can. He’s got two fucking giant shark dicks inside of a weird pussy, for fuck’s sake.

He thinks about finding a shark to fuck, or some other large fish, but dismisses it almost immediately. He’s not so pathetic. He’s not such a coward.

He finds a rocky cropping where he likes to rest, free of sand, and curls his body on the shelf there. He has to bend to reach the slit; it’s lower on his body than his own penis was. He thinks about how the mermaids did it, and presses a palm against it, giving it a firm rub, feeling a familiar spark. It’s warmer than the rest of his body, and soft and silky against his fingertips, almost like a woman’s sex. 

He pulls back, queasy. It’s not a pussy, he reminds himself. He puts his hand on it again, presses, rubs, and thinks of the mermaids’ bodies. He works, and works, and works.

They still won’t come out.

Snarling silently in frustration, he lashes his tail, then rubs harder, scraping his claws against his own belly. He thinks about eating them, about the drift of entrails and blood in the sea water, soft and warm and wet.

He almost stops himself, before he presses one clawed finger against the lips of the slit, but he doesn’t, and then he’s rubbing in, finding the cockheads nestled inside and working his fingers around them, like a woman would rub her clit, until with a hiss of satisfaction, they slip free, one, then two, coated in a fine, viscous mucus.

He fists them, one in each hand, and discovers it’s almost overwhelming, almost better than fucking the mermaids, to jack both at once. They’re long and almost too thick for his hands, slippery and white and as hot as his guts must be, smooth from tip to root. He loses himself in it, discovers that the base feels more sensitive than the head, that squeezing on the upstroke is more pleasurable than squeezing on the down. 

He feels close, and idly wonders if he’ll come from both at once. He always used to finish with one hand on his cock and one on his balls, when he was a man, and he doesn’t know where a shark’s balls are located, but in a bid for some remnant of his old self, he wraps his fingers around both cocks and squeezes, running his other fingers down the underside to the base below, where they emerge from the slit. Then... his fingers keep going... and he realizes he’s got two fingers slid right down inside himself, into a hot, wet, TIGHT channel below his cocks, and then he’s coming (both at once) and the channel _ contracts- _

He wrenches his hands away, though he’s still coming into the water in white bursts, and he can’t deny the deep satisfaction he’s felt every single time the mermaids fucked him involved that fucking hole, convulsing inside him.

He lies still on the rock. The shark’s fin on his back starts to ache from the unnatural angle. He’s still so long that little fish come to pick at the sperm he’s left drifting in the air, unaware of the predator in crisis beneath them.

A vagina. He has a vagina. Why the fuck. How the fuck?

He twists up suddenly, startling the fish pecking at his spend, and coils around to the far end of his tail. He’s seen and felt himself evacuate, and he’s sure, but he has to check, that, yes, there’s his asshole, in a whole different other place, far down near the base of his tail. It all comes out together, he’s sure, the piss and shit, and so it’s not a hole for _ that _.

It’s just the gap where his cocks sit inside him, he tries to reason, but he’s pretty sure that’s not how they work, and so he looks down at the little slit again, where his penises have slid safely home again, and tries and tries to hate his traitorous body.

* * *

A week later, maybe, he’s trying to figure out if he can get one of his own cocks into it.

He masturbates again in not even a day, and his fingers slide in again, and he keeps them there and comes so hard around them he forgets his cocks even exist for a second. Next time it’s three, but he can’t fit more than that, and he wants to go deeper, and so here he is, trying to pull his cocks free before they get hard, to see if he can worm it in before it hards. He’s probably going to hurt himself, because he kinda thinks there’s some kind of bone in them, but he’s starting to need it with a desperation he’s not sure is natural.

He does fail, because there is a bone in it, or at least some kind of unbending cartilage, and he ends up with both cocks out, rutting against the sea floor as hard as he can, three fingers deep.

When he’s not masturbating, it’s all he can think about. He thinks, with uncomfortable frequency, about what else he could put inside himself. He spots a shark circling one day, and spends hours studying it, thinking about whether he could convince it to fuck him. He looks at the coral (too sharp) and the wriggling prey he swallows whole (too many teeth/spines). He ventures in a circle from his little paradise, further each time, thinking maybe he could find a scrimshaw, or some worn bone, or something, something, some-

* * *

He alternates between desperate and furious. He wails silently at the silent sea.

Of course, when he thought he’d finally adjusted, she’d find a new way to fuck him.

* * *

The feeling, the overwhelming NEED, passes. But it still feels good, so he still keeps putting his fingers in. 

The need returns, after a few moons, and he tries it on with a shark, and almost gets his head bitten off, and tries with some dolphins, and one breaks his nose.

In _ season_, his mind whispers. In heat. Like a fucking _ dog_.

It passes. The skin of his belly is raw from humping the sea floor.

* * *

The third time, he returns to the mountain.

* * *

He doesn’t expect help. He expects to be eaten, or worse. He defied the lord of the mountain, after all.

When he approaches the dark peaks and feels the warm rising water of the molten rock on his belly, his head is swimming. He almost doesn’t notice them, until they dart out to meet him in the open water.

It’s only three of the sirens, chittering in their ancient language in what he’s sure is a call for the others, but three is more than enough to kill him. It took him a long time to realize, or maybe to accept, what they really were. Their bodies look soft and voluptuous, but it’s a ruse; they’re all piscine under the soft skin, predators more dangerous than himself. Part of him still wants to eat them, to force them to the sea floor and fuck them, and he knows part of him will always want it. 

He could have gone so bad, if he’d stayed on land.

But he respects them, so he placates, turning soft circles with his belly out, in striking distance, like he’s seen courting sharks do. There’s almost an ease in letting them decide to kill him. It’s better than this desperation, this hunger that he can’t satisfy.

The dark haired mermaid arrives, cutting silently up through the black flanked by four more, and she matches him on his circling, so that they turn sluggishly, watching each other. He sees her look down his body, at his bruised belly, at the slit that’s started to appear flushed and plump with each time he goes through this, resembling more and more her own body that nightmarish day she’d given birth.

He sees her make a choice, and drift closer. Her hand goes to his pussy, and he lets her, sighing when her fingers find the tight orifice. She sinks her slim fingers in, and his eyes flutter closed, but he knows she can’t help him, not in the way he needs, and he considers attacking her just to bring their swift justice upon him and end his suffering for good.

Before he can commit, though, she pulls her fingers free and reaches for his hand, and tugs him toward the mountain.

* * *

Maybe Wake knows how to stop it, Thomas thinks as they navigate the tight tunnels towards the heart of the mountain. Some weed to chew to alleviate the symptoms, or some ritual he can perform to get the sea to change her mind. 

Or maybe he’ll eat him right then, that huge human mouth with its flat crooked teeth will chew right through his soft belly into his organs, pop him open like one of the mermaid’s eggs, and it’ll end, it’ll all finally end.

He fantasizes, feverish, the mermaid’s hand cool in his.

“Come crawlin’ back like a dog, did ya,” Wake starts in his monstrous voice when they arrive in the cavern, but then he gets a look at Thomas, and his face changes to something else. “Oh... lad...”

Make it stop, he mouths, glaring at the creature as he spreads his winding arms about the room. The mermaid’s hand leaves his.

“Had no idea she made ye like this,” Wake murmurs, almost soothingly. “The sea is cruel, isn’t she...”

Just kill me, Thomas mouths, the water in his mouth making the words feel physical, like he’s spitting them out. His cunt aches.

“...but also... generous...” Wake whispers, and Thomas is too slow this time to dodge the tentacle that snakes around him, too sluggish and hopeless to fight off the coil of it up his body, the muscles of the cup-shaped suckers gripping him tight. 

“If ye hadn’t run off, I woulda taken care of it sooner,” Wake says, voice charged, and Thomas realizes with a jolt what that expression means, and fights for real this time, but he’s tangled in two of them already and a third winds slippery strong around his throat and arches him back, and all he can do is flail his arms and scratch at the thick skin his short claws can’t break as Wake worms a tentacle right up inside him.

“_Oh_,” Thomas says, like it’s punched out of him.

“That ain’t so bad now is it, Tommy?” the sea god says as he wraps tentacles around Thomas’ rigid body. The tentacle in his cunt wiggles, and he feels the contracting muscles of the suckers work on him from the inside, crawling up the inside of him and clinging, until he’s full with the thickness of his own wrist.

“Too... much...”

“Ye can take it,” Wake smiles, pulling their bodies close. Thomas is stiff, but gives a full body kick in a feeble attempt to get free. This close, Thomas can smell him, old and mildewy as a shipwreck, and can taste the sourness of the parasitic barnacles in the water, and the small things that crawl through the sea god’s beard and hair. His eyes are wide and bright and white, and cast a light on the place Wake is penetrating him. 

With his cocks still inside, he really does look like a woman, the lips of his slit stretched wide around Wake’s tentacle arm, as it wriggles deeper, and deeper.

“Gah,” he chokes and throws back his head, as the pressure forces his cocks to pop free, dripping with precum and the slime of his cunt.

“Laddie, I shoulda known the sea made ye for me...” Wake says, and with something filling up his virgin pussy just the way he’d been wanting, Wake’s eyes and voice start to work on him, loosening him up, despite the voice in his old human brain screaming at him to run, to escape.

“She took me from the lighthouse because she wanted children, y’see, and I did my best to give her the daughters she wanted... but she always did know the secret wants o’ my heart...” The old man’s rough gnarled hands stroke down Thomas’ chest, thick nails scraping his flat stomach, at the dusting of hair there, at the bones of his hips as Thomas cants them back, trying to ease the pressure of the thick arm pushing up inside him.

He kicks again, half hearted, Wake’s arm rooted so deep in his belly that he knows he couldn’t loosen it himself. He imagines he can feel the thinnest tip of it wriggle around his racing heart.

“Despite all the gifts she’s given me, though,” Wake says, and his voice sounds strained, like he’s slowly pistoning his cock inside Thomas and not just an arm, “I still don’t know all the secrets I’d like. I don’t know if you’ll catch.”

Thomas chokes. “H-how-”

Wake grins, and he’s definitely panting as the tentacle fucks him harder, Thomas’ smaller body jerking in his slimy grip. “You ain’t a seaman at all, are ya, lad? Octopi don’t got a willy. They just got a special... arm...”

Thomas feels him come, a ripple down the arm (thicker than the others, he realizes) and then a hot wet surge inside him, and his body goes taut and he comes like a furious storm, straining against Wake’s gripping suckers, pounding his fists against the man’s barnacled chest, all the while his chest vibrates with the sounds he can finally make, a cacophony of “AH- AH- AH-”s.

When the contractions slow, he’s hanging limp in Wake’s arms, and he tastes blood in his teeth and realizes he’s tearing into the tentacle Wake had loosened around his throat, he’s so angry, so fucking angry and so fucking hungry- And Wake is just sprawling against the black rock with a satisfied grin, as if he doesn’t even care that Thomas is eating his arm, doesn’t even care about how fucking angry-

There’s another surge in Thomas’ belly, and he realizes the asshole is still coming, his belly so full it’s swelled with it and Wake is pushing in more. He snarls, and snaps at the other arms holding him, but Wake pushes the already damaged arm into his mouth and down his throat and Thomas has no choice but to gnash his teeth and swallow until Wake is done with him.

He expects this to end with a gush of fluid clouding the water as Wake pulls out, but there’s a strange shudder, and he’s sure his cunt is still full but also sure they’ve detached, and the old fucking bastard just keeps grinning happily at him as he strokes Thomas’ swollen belly and says, “It’s what they call a “mating plug”. Fill ye up and keep ye full, provide food for the little ‘uns, makes sure if you catch that it’s mine-”

Thomas feints, goes for Wake’s face, the dark blood making the water just murky enough that Wake believes it and flinches back, just barely enough for him to break free. 

He’s too slow to make it, but he makes it, and then knows by Wake’s cackling echoing through the tunnels that he’d let him go, because how far could he go? Thomas swims hard, but he’s so full, and the length of the detached arm-turned-plug sealed inside him keeps wriggling on its fucking own, and he curls against the walls of the tunnel as he comes again, and again, still getting fucked by the sea god’s dead arm.

He’s nowhere near an exit, he’s sure, when he finally squirms into an alcove and lets his body ride out what it had been begging for and finally got. He roars, and it makes a sound, a terrible furious sound that kills the little fish dead in the water as they swim by.

He claws at the hole in his body, finding it sealed tight with some unyielding rubbery substance. All his attempts do is stimulate the arm and make it buck and kick inside him and get him off again.

He cries, but he can’t tell if there are tears.

* * *

He lingers in the caves after that. He wants to flee, but he’s fat and slow, and until the tentacle finally seems to break down and digest, he’s coming every few hours on it, his little alcove hazy with his own spend. The little fish peck at it, and he snatches them in his teeth, tasting his own sperm oozing from their bellies as he crunches through their bodies.

He loses track of time, drifts off and comes awake eating, scraping at the algae on the walls with his teeth. He yells because he can, and he kills the little things because he can, and thinks about tearing open the swell of his own belly, wondering if it’ll be full of Wake’s white sperm, like the little fish, or gelatinous eggs, or some hideous mutated thing, growing bigger and bigger, eating him from the inside.

The mermaids come. He hears their songs, and they must know where he is but they’re keeping their distance.

The dark haired mermaid is the first to show herself. She’s carrying a spongy-looking hunk of red meat in her mouth, and Thomas can taste it in the water. He coils to launch at her, but she’s already pushing it away, floating it toward him, and he snatches it and tears into it.

It’s saltier than fish. He feels something like deja vu, a buried, distant memory. The feeling of teeth tearing through fabric.

She eyes him while he eats, and he glares at her and hides his belly, humiliated and furious. She must have known what Wake would do to him when she brought him down there.

She doesn’t seem to understand his humiliation, as she pats her flat belly, and points at him.

He pauses, remembers her swollen belly, the determination and agony in her face as she birthed her strange offspring. A creature to whom impregnation is simply a part of life, and not a horror. If she mocked him, he thinks it would be for stepping on the boat, all those months, or years, ago, but not for this. Her eyes glow, with envy maybe, or maybe excitement. 

He snarls at her, and she darts away. 

The others come, more timidly, and give him similar gifts. He snaps and snarls at them, but he still eats their offerings, and most dart away unscathed, or only missing a nip of flesh from their tails.

One comes whose throat is gnarled with scarring, still lovely in spite of it; he sobers when he realizes who gave her those scars, and from then on covers his teeth for her. He had thought her dead for sure, and he thinks he might believe that these truly are the daughters of the sea, immortal, mystical, terrible creatures.

Wake’s daughters, he remembers, and it makes him furious all over again. He fucked the daughters, and then their father too. He was fucked by the sea since the day he drowned. Just fucking, all around.

* * *

He demands himself to be imagining it, or demands it to be a result of his eating, but after some months of lethargy his belly grows, and there’s movement in it.

* * *

Some instinct, or resentment, sends him on a tirade through the mountain. 

He whips through the caverns and tunnels, terrorizing the mermaids lingering there. They trill and titter and he thinks to them it must be only a thrilling game as they flee from his gnashing teeth.

He finds smaller caverns and smashes his tail against the porous rock, collapsing and blocking formally well-used passages, changing the geography of their home.

He eventually catches himself trying to seal himself inside a room filled with a thick tangle of the seaweed. He thinks he ought to be worried about his strange behavior, this anger that won’t recede. It’s worse than usual.

He’s unsatisfied. Even blocking the passages, he’s restless, and smashes through the blockages and goes searching again. 

The movement in his belly is more frequent. He thinks of the mermaid birthing, and his skin prickles. His cunt is still pasted closed. He panics, off and on, because he’s a man, and he has no fucking idea how to do this, and he just wants his belly empty so he can swim away from this mountain forever.

He hears, so often, the various rumblings of the volcano, and sometimes woven into it, the sound of Wake speaking his ancient sea tongue.

Finally, he makes his way back to him.

* * *

“I just want to get them out, and then I want to leave,” Thomas says when he first emerges into the cavern, catching Wake off guard. The giant is fussing in his stone cradle, high in the cavern, and swivels toward him at his voice, stares at him saucer-eyed, with undisguised delight.

“So ye did take, didn’ ye? Look at that... The girls told me, but seein’ ye for myself... How lovely,” Wake says dreamily, his drawling accent softening as he takes in the sight of Thomas and the ridiculous bulb of his belly. 

Thomas flushes, humiliated by the descriptor. He’s a man, face unshaven and sunken-eyed, with hair on his chest and on his pregnant belly, and he’s the farthest a creature can get from ‘lovely.’ “Shut the fuck up, asshole.”

Wakes eyes widen excitedly, clearly unphased and possibly thrilled by Thomas’ impudence. “Oh, hear the mouth on ye! The sea deigned to give ye back yur tongue and that’s how ye use it? Ha’ ye even learnt to sing yet, lad?”

Thomas growls. “I don’t care about that shit. Just tell me how I get them out. I want to leave.”

“Leave?” Wake says with a frown. “Well, ‘course you can go when you like. But you think that body isn’t gonna keep bringin’ ye back to me?”

Thomas snarls, thrashing his tail. “I didn’t fucking ask for this! Tell me, there must be something I can do to get the sea to change me! Don’t lie!”

“I won’t lie,” Wake says, voice growing deep and rumbling, the underlit brightness of his face taking on a severe quality, shadows growing black. Thomas is reminded that the thing before him is most likely some kind of god, cursed by some magic more ancient than mankind, and he shrinks backward. “I won’t lie to _ you_, lad. I didn’t ask either, but here we are, trapped together at the whims of the ocean. I can’t change it anymore than you can, and I don’t know anyway t' change it.”

Thomas sobs, sinking towards the floor of the cavern.

“But don’ be like tha’,” Wake says, leaning out from his bed but making no move toward him. “We make do wi’ what we got. If yur anythin’ like tha girls, might be years before yur body asks ye to bear fruit again. An’ I’ll keep my promise; ye can go when ye like. Though,” Wake almost looks bashful, as bashful as a gigantic, grizzle old sea dog inset with barnacles and lit from below with hellish light can look. “I admit I’d miss ye. Nice to talk to a man who’s from where I’m from, to hear a human voice again. As rude as ye are. The girls only speak the old tongue, and the sea never speaks at all.”

Thomas looks away. He tries not to see them in the same light, two lost souls trapped in the heart of the sea, bound by the same sadistic mistress. 

“How do I get them out?” he asks weakly, nodding his head at his full belly.

Wake looks resigned to the change of subject, and draws himself up to peer closer. “Well, ye look like yur fittin’ t’ burst, so it can’t be long. Ye gotta trust yur body, it got ye into that mess, it’ll get ye out.” He pauses, fingering his scruffy beard with gnarled finger. “Though... no, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“What,” Thomas bites out, taking the bait.

“I think ye’ll think I’m lyin’,” Wake says carefully, eyes sharp on Thomas’s face. “If yur like the girls... Well, while they were tryin’ it on with ye, before we knew ye were for me and not for them, they sometimes had trouble, ah, gettin’ going. Didn’t like touchin’ my own daughters that way, but if a birth seemed stubborn to start, surest way to get ‘em comin down is... puttin’ something up in.”

Thomas grinds his teeth, thinking of the dark haired mermaid and her eggs sliding out around his cock, writhing. He believes him, but says anyway, “Sounds like an excuse to fuck me again.”

Wake grins. “If it eases yur mind, my cock won’t grow back for awhile yet.” He fans his octopus arms up out of the rock bed, and Thomas sees five whole and healthy, two damaged, one nearly regrown; of the two damaged arms, one is broken off neatly near the tip and one ends in a ragged stump. They have squiggles of new flesh poking out, the beginnings of regrowth.

Thomas can see his own teeth marks in the damaged arm. “How much could I eat before it won’t grow back,” he says threateningly, tamping down a spark in his gut at the thought.

The old man lets out a booming laugh. “Yur welcome to try on me other arms, but I ain’t lettin ye put yur teeth in my cock, no matter how many babies ye give me.”

Thomas grimaces at the mention of their offspring. It’s undeniable that he’s carrying their living children, children the two of their bodies made together. “Are they gonna be monsters?” he asks quietly, unable to help himself. “Ugly little things like the... Like the women had?”

“We’ll have to see,” Wake says. “Like I said, ye weren’t meant for them, so tha’s why the things you put in ‘em were like what they were like. But you and me...”

“I might not be made for you either,” Thomas says, and he catches the glint of fear in Wake’s sober expression that tells him he might be right. “You said the sea is cruel.”

“But also, sometimes, generous.” he says gravely. “We’ll see when the little ones come.” But then his face turns smarmy. “But for now, why don’ ye come up here an’ see what I’ve got for ye?”

“Not a chance,” Thomas frowns.

“Come now!” Wake says, hoists himself out of the rock cradle, the water rippling around him, and tangles his tentacle arms in the seaweed floor. Thomas ducks back into the opening, scowling. “Come on, come see! Not like I can do much to ye plugged up like that...” The old man waggles his eyebrows, and Thomas bares his teeth. “Ye ain’t afraid, are ye?”

He is, but fuck if he’ll admit it to the old bastard, so he drifts up into the room, though he’s unable to hide the caution in his approach. Wake, to his credit, goes still when Thomas approaches, like he’s holding his breath. He waves a huge hand at the strange rock cradle he lounges in, and Thomas carefully peers into the dark space, to find a comfortable looking bed of woven seaweed, decorated with a collection of shells and trinkets.

“The fuck you showing me?” Thomas growls, and Wake looks taken aback for a moment, and then chuckles, whole body shaking. Thomas hasn’t been this close to him since they fucked, and he looks again at the tattered arm lying along the floor, and gulps.

“You been tearin' up the whole mountain lookin for a place to drop,” Wake says, and Thomas flushes when he thinks about it, his unsatisfying attempts to fortify a space for himself. “So I give ye the safest crevice, the very center of the mountain, and me, sleepin' right here on the floor under ya.”

Thomas growls, “What if I asked you to leave?”

Wake half smiles. “If only I could, lad. Crawled down in an’ now I’m too big to leave. Di’n’t lie when I said I was _ trapped_.” Then he leans forward. “But I swear to ye... Stay here wi’ me, and I’ll be at your command, your humble guard dog, ready to mangle and mutilate anythin’, and everythin’, that tries to lay eyes on ye.”

Thomas swallows. Hard. “You won’t touch me?”

Wake grins that half toothless grin, bright lit eyes blinking with mirth. “Only if ye ask.”

“I won’t ask,” Thomas snaps.

* * *

They treat him like royalty, and he thinks, about fucking time, he deserves it, after everything they’ve put him through.

He lounges on the woven bed, resting his sore body after his rampage through the mountain, Wake sprawled out on the floor of his cavern, looking half camouflaged with the teaming environment he wears on his skin. The sirens come and bring them food, huge offerings of fish and dolphin, and the occasional red salty meat, always tattered and unrecognizable. Wake eyes him carefully when he eats those offerings, and Thomas pretends not to know better.

When he grows bored, he shifts through Wake’s collection of trinkets, finding long lost debris of shipwrecks, silverware, jewelry, the deteriorating leather covers of books whose pages quickly dissolved in the sulfuric water. The sirens bring them too, new shiny items, pocket watches, cigarette cases with waterlogged little clumps of cigarette paper and tobacco dripping out. Thomas would kill for a fucking smoke.

Wake talks, constantly. He talks like an old sailor, and has a thousand stories from his time above water, and he has a thousand stories from his time below too. Thomas doesn’t much care for either and keeps his tongue most of the time, but luckily the old man sleeps, a good proper sleep unlike anything Thomas seems capable of experiencing down here, so he can bear the man’s drawl during the time he’s awake. He won’t admit it, but he’s starting to find it comforting. The old man’s voice, even when he’s tempering it, resonates in the walls. He’s getting used to the taste of the water here, the itch of those bright eyes on his skin.

He stops snapping at the women, except when their eyes linger too long on his swollen belly, and they soon learn they can come close. They watch, intrigued, when one brings a locket, and he picks open the latch and show them the miniature portrait inside.

“Ain’t worth botherin', lad,” Wake says with a sigh from his bed on the floor, soothing his damaged tentacles over one of the warm water vents. “They look like people, but they ain’t like us. Smart, but all fish inside.”

Thomas believes him, but he doesn’t particularly care. When they come close, he’s reminded of all the times he’d had sex with them, remembers the taste of their bodies, the feel of their soft breasts against his chest.

He can’t masturbate, knows that Wake would smell it in the water, but he just has to last until the creatures come out of him. He just has to last, so he holds out.

“There were others, weren’t there?” he asks one day, idly curious. “Like you and me?”

Wake nods. “Oh, some. The girls bring them into the sea with their singin’, pullin’ ‘em off ships, callin’ up storms to bring the boats under. Sometimes the sea changes them, sometimes not, but either way they can’t resist fucking the girls. They can’t resist the _ song_. Most of the time, they drown fucking.” He laughs at that, and Thomas supposes there is something bleakly humorous about it.

“So she’s changed others, though. Where are they?”

Wake snorts. “Well, the girls get bored of ‘em pretty quick. They’ll eat ‘em up once they’re done playin’.”

Thomas shivers. _ Man eaters. _

“But don’t worry, darlin’,” Wake consoles him. “None of ‘em’s ever been like ye. Yur the first aside’s me who can resist the song.”

Thomas thinks about the sound he heard in the wind, before his ship sank.

* * *

One day, the dark haired mermaid touches him, and because it’s her, he lets her. She runs a hand over his pregnant belly, and he flinches but keeps his teeth to himself, as she murmurs in her language. 

Quietly angry, he wraps his arms around her, and she lets him, preoccupied with touching his stomach, and he puts a mouth to her nipple and sucks, and she lets him. He pushes up and his cocks slip free, and he pushes into her in a quick motion. She lets him, looking quietly surprised, and then there’s a thunderous sound from the volcano below and they startle apart and she lashes free, slipping down and away into the caverns.

Thomas growls in frustration, flopping against the bed. “Was that you?”

Wake’s voice is low and deep and furious, rumbling from the dark over the edge of the cradle, and Thomas quivers. “Fucking my daughter in my own bed while carryin’ my child, and you think I would lie obediently at your feet an’ allow it?”

“Don’t got feet,” Thomas says. “You’re the one who said you’d be my _ dog_. Dogs don’t get to fuck their masters.”

Wake doesn’t reply, but the water in the room grows heavy and hot.

“I’m going fucking crazy,” Thomas mutters and burrows deeper in the bed, ignoring the needy cocks that jut from his slit.

Wake is eerily silent, for so long that Thomas gets nervous, and then comes around to being angry again.

“Fuck,” he says. Visions of the sirens dance through his head. Visions of Wake and his long wriggling tentacles. Visions of the girls he’d touched as a boy, in the hay, in the closet of an empty classroom. And of the boy from the wealthy family, behind the stables, and of Ephraim-goddamn-Winslow, and his _ mouth- _

“If you’re not gonna let me fuck,” he says before he loses his nerve. “Then come give me your fucking mouth.”

There’s a long pause, and then the room almost seems to clear, and Wake’s smug old face appears at the edge of the cradle. “That mean yur askin’?”

“Fuck you,” Thomas says, rolling his body and taking both of his cocks in hand, waggling them in the sea king’s direction and staring right into those bright eyes as he fondles them. Daring him to make him fucking ask _ again_.

Wake lurks up over the edge like a sea monster, grinning, all gross and moldy with algae and sealife, and Thomas hates him but it makes him harder. The old man’s mouth is huge as he laps at the clasper fins near his slit, big enough that Thomas could fit both fists against his white speckled tongue if he wanted, and finally he licks up over his cocks, looking like two white fat larva against his tongue, and up under belly, which he kisses open mouthed, before Thomas pushes him away and back down to his sex. 

Wake sucks him in and Thomas keeps his hands planted on the giant’s skull, buried in the grimy locks of green hair, breathing in the musky scent of decaying plantlife that rolls off of him, and rolls his hips to work his cocks into the tight suction of that ugly mouth, with its thin lips and missing, flat, yellow teeth. The tip of the old man’s tongue wriggles against the rubbery plug that keeps him sealed, and Thomas pants, pulls at his hair and beard, and forgets how much he hates the sea.

He comes twice, fucking Wake’s mouth through his first orgasm and into his second, feeling the convulsions as Wake gleefully swallows his seed, and wrapping his hands in the spikes of the shell crown to keep him close, as he works his way towards his third. Then the tip of Wake’s tongue finds purchase against the edge of the plug, and suddenly he’s coming again as the plug slips loose in a gush of mucus and fluid, and Wake is swallowing it all down like a disgusting animal.

“Fuck, what-” Thomas gasps, as his body convulses.

Wake keeps licking at his newly exposed hole, pushing his fat tongue in and sucking at the fluids. “It’s yur water breakin’,” he says with his lips against his pussy, putting one big hand tenderly on Thomas’ round belly.

Thomas shivers and bears his teeth. “Fuck.”

* * *

The labor lasts hours.

Wake tries to explain it, that his hips have to widen and pelvis shifts to allow passage of the creatures from his womb, but Thomas only half hears him, going delirious in the first hour. The dark haired mermaid comes and touches him, guides him so his tail is braced against the bedding and his hands are braced against the rock wall and he’s pushing, letting gravity help pull the weight inside him downward. The others come and touch him, rubbing their bodies against his or mouthing over his skin with their flat teeth, and he let’s Wake push the tip of a tentacle up inside him to help induce.

He shakes and trembles and sweats, murmuring and sobbing and screaming, the pain worse than any he’s felt in the whole time the sea has kept him.

“Am I going to die?” he murmurs when he’s exhausted, too tired to keep his thoughts to himself. “I hoped it would just be eggs, like the mermaid had... Is something wrong?”

“They could just be bigger than expected. It’s likely all normal, lad, just focus on what yer body says,” Wake says, somewhere behind him. Then after a moment, “Sharks have live pups, not eggs. Could be different from the girls that way. Could be normal.”

“Do... octopuses have live ones... too...?” he pants.

Wake is tellingly quiet.

Fluid and blood pour from him and cloud in the water. He feels something jerk inside him and wants to scream at Wake to be more fucking careful with his tentacles, but then he peers down his body and sees the disconcerting sight as his slit swells outward and pops like a pimple, and a baby’s head slips out, and then fat little shoulders and arms and fists and then the slick easy slide of the shark’s tail of its lower half, wriggling powerfully, and the nearest mermaid is catching it as it starts to wail in its strange little voice, cooing and cradling it to her breast, and Thomas’ head swims with relief until another contraction has him bowing, and the next infant starts to work its way free.

There it is, he thinks, in the quiet place in the back of his mind. A whole healthy child, everything in the right place. He supposes it means he was made for Wake after all.

There are two more, another shark, and one with the pale wriggling arms of an octopus, and when Thomas glances hatefully back over his shoulder at Wake, the sea king is glowing with pride and pleasure, winding his arms all around all of them in this small space of the cradle, the sirens and the babies and Thomas. Thomas sinks against the long arm Wake lifts him with, and then the man is cradling him against his wrinkled, craggy body and rubbing the last of the cramping from his flattening belly with his own big hands. The water is a haze of afterbirth and amniotic fluid.

The dark haired mermaid checks the infants, her face flushed with excitement, and she says a word that Thomas thinks he almost recognizes. “Girls,” Wake says. “You have three daughters. On land, we men would want sons, but here, daughters are better. They’ll be faster and stronger than you or I.”

Thomas doesn’t particularly care. Is he a father or mother? No, he doesn’t care. They’re not his, not really, he can tell from the way the mermaids cradle them and coo over them. 

“Those are their sisters,” he says tiredly. “Their family. Not mine.”

“Nonsense,” Wake answers, rubbing soothing circles down his belly, down his tail. “You’re their family now too.”

“They don’t love me,” he says, voice barely a whisper. “You don’t love me. No one does.”

“No...” Wake agrees. “But neither does the sea. She wouldn’t have taken us if we were capable of love. What we have... it goes deeper than love.”

* * *

He drifts for a bit, a kind of sleep. He wakes wrapped in Wake’s tentacles, the giant snoring away beside him, the two of them cuddled up in the cradle. The sirens and the babies have vanished, but there’s meat stacked beneath stone nearby and Thomas tears into it, starving. 

When his belly is full, he looks at the tunnels for a long time. Then he curls his body back into Wake’s nest of tentacles and drifts some more. 

* * *

He feels sluggish when he decides to go, waiting for Wake to sleep again and slipping away between his snores, but his body quickly remembers the strength and speed it once had before it was burdened with children as he winds up out of the maze of the mountain. The water grows cool, and it energizes him, and he almost feels good, for the first time in a long time.

In the open expanse outside the mountain, the dark haired mermaid is waiting for him.

She approaches slowly, and he wonders if she’s here to stop him, that Wake lied and he’s going to be trapped in the rocky caverns for the rest of his days, a pregnant prisoner constantly birthing his progeny.

But she only touches him, like she’s not afraid of his teeth at all anymore. She puts her hand on his flat belly, and then hers. He thinks about the eggs, about what Wake said.

“The sea will bring someone for you, your father said,” he tells her. 

She tilts her head, not understanding. She doesn’t look sad, not like a human woman might. He thinks it seems more like waiting.

She brushes her fingers down his stomach and puts a hand tentatively to his slit. He shivers, but as she slips her fingers in, he recognizes it as an examination, assuring he’s not torn and free of blood. But then she pushes deeper and strokes the walls inside him gently.

He’s seen the girls do this with each other, occasionally. He knows it’s nothing meaningful, not the way he had once wished it would be, but more like their way of taking care of each other. He knows Wake wouldn’t be angry about this.

He hesitates, then touches her breast, and then pushes his fingers inside her. Together they work each other with their hands until they both orgasm in the open water, Thomas’ bared cocks spurting his seed into the water untouched.

She leans against him a moment, then pushes away, and says a word and gestures to him. He recognizes it, he thinks, as the word she uses for her sisters. It twinges at him, still cuts at that pathetic male pride he’d carried from the human world, where to be called something womanly was shameful, but he can’t deny the truth of it. He nods.

She kicks her long tail in the black water and drifts out into the dark, pale skin and glistening scales catching the light of the liquid rock below and the distant, dim sun above, and she says a word that he knows means “hunt.”

“Prey,” she says. “Eat.”

Thomas despite all of his self loathing, despite the wicked thoughts that came and still come through his head, knows he wasn’t a bad person, when he was alive, not irreversibly so. But he did a bad thing, a terrible, unforgivable thing, and he supposes if this was what was chosen as his punishment, he could do worse. 

He nods, and goes to follow, but she pauses and turns for a moment, looking out into the water. He looks, and sees it, the hulk of some great, indescribable living thing, moving through the depths far below them. Not whale, or shark, bigger than a ship. Bigger than the mountain.

“Mother,” she says, pointing.

Thomas and the mermaid watch the shape until it vanishes, impossibly, into the water itself.

Why does the sea do anything, he hears Wake’s voice echo in his head.

Then the mermaid leads him out into the water. They’ll hunt together, and later, Thomas will return with his hunger sated and maybe ask Wake to fuck him again. And in some months, whenever the sea has decided it should happen, he’ll carry more of his offspring to term, and eat another one of his arms, because the old shithead deserves it. And he thinks he’s starting to feel fine with that.

The sea is cruel, and the sea is generous.

* * *

One night, many miles away, where the outlet of a cold river meets the sea, Ephraim Winslow wakes below the water, and begins to drown.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta'd, so please let me know if I've missed any typos or whether I should add any more warning tags. Also sorry for the weird fucked up fic ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


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